Reprinted from TomDispatch: What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are...
Trump’s Doubling Down on Imperialism in Latin America Is a Formula for Decline
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Give Donald Trump credit. He’s added new meaning to that ancient phrase “gunboat diplomacy.” In fact, by the time I wrote this introduction, his administration had already attacked 35 boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern...
Edging Closer to Armageddon?
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. These days, no kids in school are ducking and covering under their desks. American magazines don’t have stories about families (with the money) building private nuclear shelters to guard against an attack on this country. And I can...
A Thermonuclear Hair Trigger
From TomDispatch: Once in the previous century, I actually visited the city of Hiroshima. I was an editor at Pantheon Books and had published a translation of a Japanese volume, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. In it, years later, a few...
An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech
Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties...
A New Gold(en) Mine for Arms Contractors
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Donald Trump remains a mystery man of some eerie sort. After all, just ask yourself, why in the world did he only recently announce that this country was going to “immediately” resume nuclear testing, not having tested a nuclear weapon —...
Escalating the Escalation: A Murder Incorporated Tale of the Drug Wars
Reprinted from TomDispatch: There’s one rule in the age of Donald Trump. When it comes to him, you simply can’t rule anything out. It’s true that, only recently, when asked about the possibility that he would order military strikes not just on ships off the coast of...
The Trump Administration’s Military Occupation of America
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them...
What’s In a Name? The ‘Defense’ Department Has Always Been About War
The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and...
The Department of War Is Back!
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. My fellow Americans, my critical voice has finally been heard inside the Oval Office. No, not my voice against the $1.7 trillion this country is planning to spend on new nuclear weapons. No, not my call to cut the Pentagon budget in...


